Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

We don't admit errors easily. There is probably nothing more difficult
for us to say than "I'm sorry." Each time we bring ourselves to do it,
we acknowledge that we are less than perfect and far from infallible.
Resistance wells up from the very depth of our being. How often have we
been scene to the following Nietzschian dialogue: "'I have done that?'
asks my memory. 'I cannot have done that,' says my pride and remains
inexorable. Eventually memory yields." Without a measure of
self-awareness and courage, truth invariably falls prey to our
psychological needs.

The sacrificial system we read about this week confronts this human
failing head-on. How archaic, yet how contemporary! In listing the
categories of sacrifices that may be offered on the altar of the just-
finished Tabernacle, the Torah introduces the purification offering, in
Hebrew, hattat. Though we shall come across it many times again in the
Torah, this first instance is particularly striking and relevant, because
we are dealing with a case of ritual inspired by morality.

The hattat is to be brought by someone guilty of violating one of God's
commandments inadvertently. We are not talking of a willful
transgression, but an honest mistake made out of ignorance or poor
judgment. When discovered, the act must be atoned for by a rite of
public contrition that serves to purge the sacred space of the Tabernacle
of any contamination left in the wake of a sin. Interestingly, the Torah
takes up the more prevalent case first, transgressions committed
unwittingly rather than wittingly. The assumption is that most members
of the community will do their utmost to abide by the standards and
practices of the community. Human weakness and not subversion is the
greatest threat to the well-being of the whole. Inadvertent mistakes
abound, yet to admit them requires an act of self-transcendence.

To the Torah's lasting credit, it starts at the top of society and not
the bottom. Before it comes to the private behavior of the ordinary
Israelite, it takes up the public behavior of the high priest, the
community as a whole and the chieftain. How incredibly frightening to
apologize for a deed done while in the limelight as a religious or
political leader of the nation! Still, the Torah demands that the high
priest or chieftain bring a purification offering when they unknowingly
have misspoken or led astray. Even the entire nation must atone if it
has collectively stumbled into a policy or pursuit fraught with moral
ambiguity. "My country, right or wrong" is a mind set that militates
against concession and contrition.

The Rabbis deepen the demand for humility. They note the unusual use of
the adverb asher in verse 4:22: "When (asher) the chieftain does wrong by
violating any of the Lord's prohibitive commandments inadvertently..."
Since the more common word used throughout our parasha is im, "if," the
anomaly stimulates an inspired midrash by Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who
led the battered Jewish community of Palestine after the destruction of
the Second Temple by daring to reconfigure Judaism without a central
cult: "Fortunate (reading ashre as opposed to asher) is the generation
whose leader is prepared to bring a sacrifice for his or her inadvertent
error." The statement grants an illuminating insight into Rabbi Yohanan
ben Zakkai's conception of leadership. He knew that the times called for
bold action, but he was also acutely aware that grave mistakes could be
made. The correct pose was not to avoid any initiative, but to act
assertively in a spirit of humility. A sense of fallibility ought to
deter leaders from defending acts of omission or commission when the
evidence shows that they were deeply flawed. A leader who never errs
never grows. With the end of the sacrificial cult, things have gotten
more complicated. Bringing a hattat offering spared one the need for a
confessional statement. The ritual said it all. In our day we must put
remorse into rhetoric, as well as deeds, and if the words are uttered
begrudgingly, parsimoniously and selectively they remain ineffectual, the
stain of moral contamination endures.

It is for this reason that the Vatican's long awaited "Reflection on the
Shoah," more than a decade in the making, is such a disappointment. The
prior deeds of Pope John Paul II, his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto Monument
in 1983, his visit to the synagogue in Rome in 1986, his extension of
diplomatic recognition to Israel in 1994 and his hosting of a concert at
the Vatican in April, 1994 to commemorate the Shoah, had primed world
Jewry to expect a more pained admission of Church passivity in the midst
of the Nazis' war against the Jews. Crafted in the spirit of an apologia
rather than an apology (to quote The New Republic), the document lacks
the magnanimity and moral passion that have come to characterize the
remarkable leadership of this pope.

The use of the Hebrew vocabulary for Holocaust, "Shoah," and repentance,
"teshuva," cannot offset the all-too frequent recourse to distinctions
that limit Church culpability in the dark history of Jewish persecution.
For example, the implied chasm in the Middle Ages between a Church
preaching love and a mob practicing pogroms ignores the Church's own vast
legal and rhetorical arsenal of contempt for Judaism. Nor was the Jewish
struggle for emancipation in Europe over "by the end of the 18th century
and the beginning of the 19th century." It had barely begun, and the
Church, especially in France and Poland, would bitterly oppose any change
in the exclusion of Jews from the body politic.

And that Church legacy of resistance to equality and integration for Jews
makes the distinction drawn by "The Reflection" between traditional
anti-Judaism and modern racist anti-Semitism too pat and self-serving.
It may be that Hitler and his idealogues were driven by a
pseudo-scientific Jew-hatred that was equally anti-Christian (though
Hitler was astute enough to generally conceal the fact), but they surely
benefitted from the still prevailing anti-Judaism, which silenced the
majority of bystanders who witnessed the revoking of Jewish equality in
the 1930s and the elimination of Jews from society in the war years. Had
churchmen condemned the brutal reversal of emancipation in Germany after
1933 with the same vigor and courage they later aimed at the Nazi policy
of euthanasia, they might have registered a similar victory. But at the
time, their concern did not extend beyond the fate of converted Jews
threatened by the Nazis' racist legislation reordering society.

Precisely because totalitarian regimes are threatened by dissent and
unrest, silence often becomes a form of complicity. Until the Vatican is
prepared to confront forthrightly the judgment of Pope Pius XII to remain
silent throughout, as it fails to do here, it will not be able to
convince Jews or anyone else of its implicit claim that "Our hands did
not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done (Deuteronomy 21:7)."
The cause of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation and the moral stature of Pope
John Paul II deserved more than this halfhearted hattat.